Week 2: Introduction to R

R Statistical Software is the environment in which you will do the vast majority of your data analysis. It allows you to work with data, run analyses, make figures, and more. To be an effective fisheries scientist, you will need to build a working knowledge of this. It’s a steep learning curve, but the payoff is tremendous.

We’re going to start from the beginning in this course, and build from there. This week we will become acquainted with the R environment and do some initial coding.

Lecture Topics

The philosophy of R

Reproducible code

R as a calculator

R as a language

Infinite expansion via packages

R makes hard things easy…

… but without training easy things can be hard

Intro to R syntax

How to ask good questions

In-class Activities

R Basics

Calculations

Variables

Importing data and basic operations

Comments

Organizing code into scripts

Activating and using packages

Resources

There are many resources online that will help you learn R. If video-based learning is your thing, I suggest Datacamp: https://www.datacamp.com/courses/free-introduction-to-r